


strike true

by targe (headlong)



Category: Uta no Prince-sama
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 03:56:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15810840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headlong/pseuds/targe
Summary: Ai takes a few days to run a necessary update. Syo takes a few days to have a crisis.





	strike true

**Author's Note:**

> a gift for my friend alice, which was sitting completed on my hard drive for over six months? whoops

There’s a spring in Syo’s step as he heads back to his dorm before dinner, on his way back from the music room where he’d been messing around with lyrics. Natsuki’s out of town for a week, on a shoot with Otoya and Masato, and he’s looking forward to having the space to himself for once. Well, Ai will be there too, but he’s always so quiet. He’s usually reading, or browsing the net, or doing something else that keeps him out of the way. Despite the fact that his belongings still take up half – more than half – of the room, it feels like he barely counts.

He digs through his pockets for keys, finds them, lets himself into his room. Ai’s there, folded into one of the chairs, but he’s not alone. Reiji’s seated in the other, clearly and unusually restless; he snaps abruptly back to himself when Syo closes the door behind him.

“Syotan! Good to see you.”

“Hi,” he manages. “What’s going on?”

“I was waiting for you, actually. We,” he says, gesturing between himself and his bandmate, “had a favour to ask.”

“Reiji,” Ai says, in his usual flat voice. But to Syo, who’s known him for months, it clearly reads as irritation. “I’ve already told you it’s ridiculous.”

“Uh. What is?”

Ai sighs. “I have to install a major update to my software. I had been delaying it so it wouldn’t jeopardise filming _Innocent Wind_ , but it’s become critical.”

“What Aiai means is,” Reiji says, “we were hoping he could stay here while he does that.”

“This is my room. You don’t need to ask for his permission.”

Reiji ignores these protests completely. “I’d offer to let him move in with me, but I’m flying out for a job tonight. Please, Syotan? I’d be happy to know he’s in safe hands.”

There’s no tactful way for Syo to approach this, but he should probably step in sooner rather than later. “I thought you’d have to go to a lab or something, Ai. Is it okay for you to do this from the dorms?”

Ai purses his lips very, very slightly. “There’s a lab, but I don’t want to go.”

Fair enough. “How long is it gonna take?”

“Expected reboot time is approximately two days and ten hours, if I dedicate all my processors to it, but then I risk overheating. Revised estimate, accounting for temperature and leaving room for error, is three days and twenty hours.”

“Well,” says Syo, “it doesn’t seem like a problem. I just… need to keep an eye on him, right?”

“Uh-huh. Thanks!” Reiji flicks him a grateful salute, and scoots over to the door. “Well, that’s a relief, but I have to hurry or I’ll miss my plane. See you!”

“I don’t need to be coddled,” Ai says, but it goes unanswered except for the click of the lock. And then it’s just Syo and Ai, and the weird prospect of the next few days. The room already seems much smaller for Reiji’s absence.

Ai rises, walks with purpose to station himself in a corner. Syo hovers, not sure what he should be doing.

“Are you… gonna start now?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“And you’re gonna stand up for it?”

A cord slithers out of Ai’s pant leg, like some kind of lilac worm, and he crouches to plug it into the power socket behind him. “Yes. I don’t experience physical pain or discomfort the same way you would.”

“Then, uh, is there anything I can do to help? Reiji didn’t really give specifics. ”

“No.”

“You don’t need to be stubborn, Ai. Like I said, I want to support you, and Natsuki would too if he was here –”

“I’m not being stubborn. You’re all worrying too much.” Ai stands again, moves to be a comfortable distance from the wall. His charger cord unreels as he goes. “It’s a standard procedure. Besides, it’s impossible for you to assist with this.”

“What? At all?”

“Well. There’s one way I could optimise the installation, but it doesn’t matter.”

“It does, if it’s going to help you.”

“Like any computer, my processors work faster in the cold. However, for best results, you would need to keep this room just above freezing point. And as that temperature range is uncomfortable for humans, that’s an unreasonable request.”

“I don’t mind,” says Syo, and it comes out a little too forceful. “I’ll wear layers.”

Ai watches him for a long moment. Syo meets his gaze, hyper-aware he has to crane his neck to do so. For all the months they’ve lived together, and as much as they’ve grown closer since the _Innocent Wind_ shoot, Ai’s still a mystery to him. And knowing that – well, knowing he’s a robot – doesn’t solve as much of that puzzle as it should. At last, after what feels like an eternity, Ai looks away.

“Do what you like.”

“Hey, can I… can I ask something first?” When no objection comes, he plunges onward. “Is it scary when you shut down? It seems like it’d be intense.”

He gets his answer immediately. “Are you afraid to go to sleep at night?”

“Uh, no, but –”

“It’s as natural to me as sleep is to you. I’m used to switching myself off and rebooting.”

The words tumble out before he can think better of them. “Then how about… how about when you shut down without choosing to? Like you did on that film set?”

“Syo,” he says, voice betraying something almost less than calm, “I’m going to start the update now.”

Idiot. He’s supposed to be helping unconditionally, not emphasising how strange this whole situation is. Syo tucks his fingers into his palm and backtracks. “Okay. Well, goodnight then?”

“Good night,” Ai echoes, and shuts his eyes.

*

Syo turns on the aircon and cranks it as low as it goes, which turns out to be about fifteen Celsius. Not nearly as cold as Ai had requested, but better than nothing. Still, chill always slices right through him, and by the time he’s dug out half his winter wardrobe, the fan he used in his old room at Saotome Academy, and the electric blanket his family sent last year, he’s definitely starting to feel it.

He pulls on a sweater, fingerless gloves, and a thicker pair of socks, then sets to rigging up the fan. It’s one of those stand-alone ones, a giant thing nearly as tall as he is, and it had saved his life during the first summer of the idol course; he knows from experience that it’ll bring the temperature right down. He plugs it into the other socket, then drags it to a useful distance and angles it toward his roommate. The force of the breeze sends Ai’s hair fluttering back, exposing his face and making him look older and younger at once. His eyes are open, but his gaze is completely blank as his processors work. Only the hum of his internals, and the faint glow of his pupils, betray the fact he’s alive at all. It’s unsettling, if Syo is honest with himself, how strange and still he is, more like a doll than anything else.

He steps back from the fan, but something compels him not to look away. It’s been weeks, and he still hasn’t entirely digested what it means that his roommate isn’t human. The weirdest part is, he doesn’t think it actually changes anything about their relationship. Actually, it’s only increased his curiosity; Ai doesn’t talk about himself much at the best of times, and now everything about him seems even more mysterious.

Syo distracts himself from the business of Ai as best as he can, and it helps that he has a lot of minor chores to do. He does an inventory of his makeup stores, discovering with some annoyance that he’s running low on foundation and his preferred shade of nailpolish. He reorganises his hats, first by colour, then by style, and then by colour again when he decides he prefers it. He checks the Starish group chat, finds photos from the other three of the town they’re shooting at. Otoya’s are reasonable, although the filters he’s slapped on are uncomfortably bright; Masato’s are taken with a clear eye for composition, laid out elegantly as a painting; Natsuki’s are blurry and almost out of focus, like he’d been trying to capture Bigfoot rather than a beachside resort. He sends some generic response before switching his phone off, tossing it onto his bed, and pulling out the lyrics he’d been working on this afternoon.

The song Nanami had written for him this time was upbeat, with a swelling chorus moving through major chords, but no words he comes up with seem to fit. He bounces his pen uselessly between his fingers as he stares at her score, then back at the paper he’d filled with potential lyrics. More than half of what he’s put down this afternoon has been unusable, scribbled out in a heavy hand. It’s frustrating; this shouldn’t be difficult, but everything seems to be eluding him today.

He looks up at a knock on the door. Accidentally makes eye contact with Ai.

Syo startles, almost falling over, and it takes several deep breaths to make him settle again. Strangely, having the robot’s cool gaze on him makes him feel like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have, uncomfortable and out of place. But that’s ridiculous; Ai isn’t even… well, he’s here, but he isn’t conscious, right? No, but he has to be awake on some level to run the update process. Either way, though, he should get the door before he does his head in thinking about it.

His visitor turns out to be Tokiya, here to fetch him for dinner. The members of Starish make it a point to eat together as much as possible, even when many of them are away. It must be later than he thought, if they’ve sent someone to get him.

“It’s almost summer,” says Tokiya, expression warring between amusement and complete confusion as he takes in Syo’s outfit.

“I know,” he says, slipping out into the hallway and locking the door behind him. It’s much warmer outside, especially for this time of year, and he pushes his sleeves up to compensate. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Fine!”

“If you’re sure,” Tokiya says, and Syo’s quietly thankful that, of all his friends still at the dorm, Tokiya’s the least likely to pry. Instead, he lets his thoughts wander as they pass through the dorm corridors; do Quartet Night eat together, too? Reiji’s away, of course, but would Ranmaru and Camus go out of their way to check on Ai if they hadn’t seen him? He has a hard time imagining it. Do they even know their bandmate isn’t human?

Syo hurries to put that out of his mind. Whatever’s going on with Quartet Night, it isn’t his business. And even if it bothers him, well, Ai had said as much himself: he isn’t the type to get lonely.

*

Even missing half their number, dinner is a lively affair. Both Ren and Cecil are more than capable of carrying a conversation on their own; Tokiya jumps in when called upon, providing a more grounded counterpoint; and Nanami, much as she seems to live in her own head sometimes, chimes in now and then. But Syo’s thoughts are still scattered, an even split between the lyrics he can’t seem to write and Ai, alone in the dorm room, somewhere between sleep and waking.

(As for the question of Quartet Night: Ranmaru slinks in about twenty minutes after they’ve started eating, loads up a tray with food, and vanishes just as quickly. Camus never shows up at all.)

After he dodges the fiftieth question about his health – are things okay, is he feeling sick at all, is there a reason he’s barely touched his food – he excuses himself early. Ignores the worried looks he can feel his friends trading behind his back as he goes.

His room is verging on arctic when he returns; it’s definitely much colder now than when he left. He checks on Ai first, and he doesn’t think it’s his imagination that his machinery seems to be whirring more loudly. With that sorted, and with his neck and lower face buried in a scarf, he perches on the edge of his bed and thinks about what he’s going to do tomorrow.

His schedule looks comparatively free; it’s been a long time since he’s had to follow the strict regimen Ai drew up for them. Mentally, he slots in a visit to the gym before breakfast and, because he can afford it with both his roommates busy, an unhurried shower afterward. There’s only so much Starish can do as a group with half of them away, but dance practice before lunch is a staple. And he has that big audition Hyuga recommended him for the day after tomorrow, so he’ll need to spend at least an hour – no, an hour and a half – revising his lines. And if he’s going to be seen in public, especially for a job, he’ll have to redo his nailpolish; his latest coat is already starting to chip, even though it’s only been a couple of days. And then there’s the problem of this song he’s meant to be putting words to, which he’s supposed to be recording next week. He should try find Nanami and talk to her about it, if she’s free, and text her to set that up tonight.

But also: he’d told Reiji he’d look after Ai. No, he’d more or less _promised_.

Ai had been very firm on the point of this process being a standard, harmless one, but that doesn’t sit right with Syo at all. He knows for a fact Ai wouldn’t ask for help, even if he needed it; knows it from experience, now. But he isn’t the type to downplay problems when they appear either, too straightforward to see the point in lying. Which leaves Syo back where he started, and with no obvious path to compromise.

It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.

He wraps himself in a blanket and wrestles with his lyrics again, still without any luck, for about another half an hour. This is the kind of thing he’d like to ask Ai about, even if he can already predict the advice he’d get. _I just think about how the listener should feel_ , or something like that. At the very least, imagining that conversation makes his problem clear: he doesn’t really have a vision for this track. There are themes that tend to crop up in his lyrics, but he’s not sure how to string them together this time in a way that feels fresh. Maybe he’ll try his usual fallbacks – going for a walk, working out, rewatching one of Hyuga’s old shows for inspiration – sometime in the next couple of days. It can’t work out any worse than staring at a scrap of paper for hours.

In the meantime, he puts in headphones and brings up the piano version Nanami had recorded. He closes his eyes and lets it wash over him, humming along with it in short snatches. The melody line is perfect for his range, as always, with a couple of soaring tenor notes where he’ll be able to really show off; he’d asked for something a bit grander this time, and she’d definitely pulled through. He feels bad even entertaining the idea, since her songs are never anything less than perfect, but maybe he could ask her to rearrange a couple of sections? At any rate, two heads will be better than one, and he’s never met anyone who’s a more useful sounding board than Nanami.

Too soon, after four loops of the track (or maybe five?), he starts to catch himself nodding off. It isn’t that late, but the cold always makes him sleepy. Better to call it a night now than to keep pushing himself and achieve nothing.

Syo changes into pyjamas, makes sure his phone is set to charge and his alarm is on, then flicks the lights and crawls into bed. Of course, in classic fashion, he’s much less tired as soon as he gets under the covers, and he tosses and turns for what feels like an hour. It’s difficult to relax with the human figure in one corner, looming shape obvious even in the darkness, or with the glow of Ai’s gaze tinting the whole place in green. But his room is very cold and his bed is very warm, and the more he thinks about it the less he feels inclined to do anything.

He doesn’t sleep well that night at all.

*

Syo meets Nanami in one of the music rooms late the next afternoon, as agreed. She’s already at the piano when he arrives, running through a familiar melody, and looks up at his approach. Her fingers still, but her final notes hang in the air a few seconds more.

“Sorry,” he says. He is acutely aware, as ever, that he’s alone with her. “Were you busy?”

“Not at all. I just got here a bit early – anyway, what did you want to talk about?”

He draws a deep breath. “So, that song you wrote for me.”

He’d carefully planned how to approach this, how to break it to her gently that he was struggling without getting into the bulk of his problems. But in the moment that all goes out the window, and he confesses the whole thing: how for whatever reason, he can’t nail down the approach he wants to take to the lyrics, and how looking out for Ai has thrown him off even more. She tells him she isn’t that attached to the current arrangement, but it still makes his heart ache a little when she suggests they tweak it.

They try slowing it down, first as a whole and then in parts. They try speeding it up, using the same method. They try opening it with an instrumental, with a chorus, with a section from the bridge. They transpose it down two keys, up five, move it back to the original. Nothing seems to stick.

“It’s fun the way it is,” Syo says, nails drumming against the piano lid as he rests against it, “but can we make it more… I don’t know, passionate? Like, mature passionate?”

They move part of the chorus back to the start, a capella, and follow it up with a punchy new riff. Nanami adjusts the verses slightly more towards a minor key, to make the refrain swell more in proportion. They throw in a key change in the final chorus. And the words take shape as they work – or, more accurately, the _idea_ of words. Because their efforts have formed the piece into something which tells a clear story, and it’s beginning to look like one he thinks he’ll be able to tell.

By the time they’re finished, it’s almost sunset. And while Nanami’s clearly started to droop a little, and Syo himself isn’t doing much better, he thinks he can finally do something with this track. At last she shoos him away, determined to record an instrumental and rewrite the score before she leaves, and to get them to him sometime tomorrow. He musters the most genuine thank-you he can, and goes gratefully.

He hurries back to his room after dinner for the second night in a row, but at least this time he has an acceptable excuse. It’s true that he can’t get started properly on the lyrics until he has the score and instrumental, but he wants to write down what he has while it’s still fresh. Nanami flashes him a smile as he leaves, sincere but exhausted.

It still feels more like a meat locker in his dorm than a well-insulated room inside a lavish building, where people actually live, but hopefully that’s for the best. He checked on Ai before meeting Nanami and again just before dinner, so he’s not too worried on that front; his temperature is stable, his processors are working at the same volume, and he’s still securely plugged in at the wall. Still, as Syo jots down notes for his lyrics – _protection? distance? ask hijirikawa how he writes poetic stuff maybe_ – and sets up to repaint his nails before his audition tomorrow, he makes sure to face towards his roommate. Just in case.

The first thing he has to do, after begrudgingly removing his gloves, is get rid of the old layer of nailpolish. Usually he’d open a window for ventilation, because the acetone stinks and the polish isn’t much better, but it’s hot out tonight. And he doesn’t want to risk compromising Ai’s update speed, so he’ll just have to deal with it.

The first whiff of nailpolish remover, which he catches by accident as he unscrews the top, is truly awful. He coughs and burrows his face into his sleeve, waiting there until he deems it safe to breathe again. Once the air has cleared, he dabs some of the stuff onto a cotton bud and starts to work, buffing the black from the nails of his left hand in even passes. But as he’s about to start on his right thumb – out of the corner of his eye, something _moves_.

Syo jumps, and the bottle of acetone goes flying. The lid is on, because he’d learned that lesson a long time ago, but that isn’t his first concern. Forcing himself to take a slow, deep breath, he looks at the robot in the corner of his room.

All Ai’s limbs are positioned the same way they were a minute ago: legs shoulder-width apart, arms slightly raised, palms not quite parallel to each other. And yet, Syo knows what he saw. Rationally, he knows that Ai doesn’t have control over his body right now, that he’s perfectly still, and that even if his systems _were_ online, he’d be above trying to pull off cheap scares. But for all that: there’s no way one of his arms didn’t just twitch.

He tries to go back to cleaning his nails, but it’s no use. Once the idea’s been planted in his head, he finds it impossible not to keep glancing up at Ai. Again and again, he’s met with the same perfectly poised sight, but it does nothing to calm his nerves.

Suddenly, sharply, he wishes Natsuki was here. He’d never freak out over something like this, and Syo could really use his friend’s brand of cheerful imperviousness right now.

He sighs through his teeth, and shuffles around to the other side of the table he’s kneeling at. But putting the threat at his back doesn’t help; just because he can’t see Ai doesn’t mean he isn’t there. His mind conjures up a million horror-movie possibilities, one after another, all variations on the same terrifying thing. That he’ll look back, and Ai will have gotten very, very slightly closer, and he’ll convince himself he’s being ridiculous, except when he turns around again there’ll be no way he hasn’t shifted a few inches forward, because the cord twisting by his feet definitely looks a little longer, and it’ll go on and on until he looks back and _Ai will be right behind him_ –

Syo shivers, and he doesn’t think it’s from the cold. Now that he thinks about it, this angle is actually worse than his previous one. It forces him to keep turning his head to check if anything’s happened, and that action’s unsettling enough even without the fear of what he might see. Which means he’s stuck between two possible evils – being convinced that Ai is moving in his peripheral vision or being convinced that he’s creeping up from behind – and either way, his focus is completely shot.

Eventually, he slumps onto the ground and stares miserably at the ceiling, two of his fingernails still dark with polish. This is so, so stupid: he’s supposed to be helping, not winding himself up over nothing. What’s the worst Ai could do, even if he _was_ conscious? Tell him off for wearing too many cosmetics, again?

In the end, he caves and throws a sheet over Ai. He isn’t happy about it, but if that’s the price he has to pay for his sanity, well. He’ll figure out how to apologise later.

*

Syo gets home well after dinner the next day, exhausted but ultimately hopeful. The audition had wound up stretching much longer than planned; they’d liked his initial performance, so they’d had him stay back for a second round, and then a third. Hyuga’s connections might have gotten him in the door, but he’s confident his own talent and passion kept him there. The role he’d been called in for was for the next series of a sentai show, one he’s been keeping up with since he was a kid, and it’d be a dream come true to appear in it. (Even if he’d only be playing a recurring ally, and not one of the rangers themselves.) He’s meant to be finding out later in the week, and waiting is going to be torture.

There’d been an envelope under his door when he returned; as promised, Nanami had dropped off an updated score and instrumental of his new song. Now, sprawled uselessly on his bed, he considers his next move. He’s already eaten, he isn’t really in a mood to socialise beyond some cursory texts about how his day went, and he doesn’t think he has the brainpower to do much about his song tonight. Maybe he’ll just have to turn in early.

He looks restlessly around the room, until at last his gaze passes over something large and white in the far corner. It takes a moment before he realises what it is, but then the guilt hits him full-force. He’d been in such a rush that he’d forgotten to take the sheet off Ai before he left this morning. Reluctantly, Syo levers himself up to fix that.

He does the same basic checks, although he doesn’t know if they’ll help, and finds the robot’s condition to be stable. There’s another issue, though: after a day spent under a sheet and another at the mercy of a fan beamed into his face, Ai’s hair is a disaster. It looks like it’s flattened a little, with flyaways in every possible direction, and his ponytail looks like it needs to be re-tied. He definitely won’t be happy if he wakes up and finds his appearance a mess.

Syo turns the fan down and slides it back a little. Then he reaches out with tentative hands, and tries to finger-comb his fringe into place. It feels weirdly intimate in a way his usual check-ups don’t, even though he’s standing a good foot and a half away. It’s stubborn, though, and resists even his most valiant efforts to force it back into place. Shining had clearly spared no expense on constructing Ai if his hair is this… well, human.

After a solid minute of fussing, he goes to fetch a comb and starts again. He teases it gently through the knots – starting with the fringe, making his way around to the sides, then undoing the ponytail – and his mind wanders as he works. Better that than fixating on how weird this is, or how different his roommate looks with his hair down.

It’s frustrating how little he can do for Ai, even when he needs support the most. First at the _Innocent Wind_ shoot, when he’d collapsed, and now again with this critical update. It’s true that any help he offered would be met with a refusal, but the more he has to deal with that, the more frustrating it becomes.

Ai’s wound up helping him more than he could ever have expected: not just because of the brutal schedule he’d set on their first meeting, or the advice he’d been able to provide as an industry veteran, but by giving him something to strive for. Trying to keep up with Quartet Night as a whole, and Ai in particular, has made Syo work harder in the last several months than the rest of his life, combined. He just wishes he knew how to repay him properly, not in small favours that only ever seem to glance off him, and never strike true. But there’s no way to reach him if he doesn’t want to be reached.

His hand stills, comb snagged in Ai’s hair. That’s _it_.

He almost stubs his toe on the furniture in his mad scramble to the desk. With shaking fingers, he fans Nanami’s score out around him, then flips open his notebook and starts to write.

It isn’t a song for Ai, but it might be a song _about_ Ai. Syo’s not sure he wants to unpack it much more than that, but he pours it all in regardless: wanting to help someone, and prove they’re not alone. But being stopped again and again by some uncrossable distance, by the walls they’ve put up around themselves, by an unspoken loneliness that reels him in even as it pushes him away.

It’s almost laughable how quickly he’s done, considering all the time he’s wasted on it this week. Sitting back, he looks over it again. The verses are mostly about the current state of the relationship, about being in a weird deadlock he can’t seem to break, and the chorus expresses the desire to have that change. And the bridge takes that theme to its conclusion, ending in a plea for real, honest connection. Not bad, if he says so himself.

He has to stifle a yawn, and then the exhaustion he’s been suppressing hits him all at once. He wants to do a second pass over his work, but it seems like he’ll have to save that for after he’s rested.

He gets ready for bed, buries himself under a million blankets, drifts off almost as soon as his head hits the pillow. For once, the strange human silhouette in the corner of his room doesn’t bother him at all.

*

When Syo gets back from his shower the next morning, the room is at its usual temperature. And Ai is at the desk – dressed in clean clothes, hair neatly re-tied – leafing through some papers. Syo steels himself, not at all sure what he should be expecting.

In his usual merciless fashion, Ai addresses him before he can even sit down. “Did you write this?”

“Huh?” he says eloquently, and then it clicks. He has to stop himself from launching himself across the room to snatch the papers back. “Is that – are those my lyrics?”

This is a disaster. He’s never been subtle at the best of times, and there’s no way Ai isn’t going to pick up on the subject matter. He’d tried to keep it a little vague, of course, but really: who else could it be about?

“They’re good,” Ai says. “You’ve matured as a lyricist.”

It should feel like a bullet dodged, a rare moment of open praise from someone who’s usually unforgiving, but in the moment Syo finds himself strangely disappointed. At least if he’d been called out for it, his sentiments might have gotten through.

“Thanks.”

He busies himself with packing up his toiletries and choosing a hat for the day, dedicating all his focus to the task. If he keeps looking at Ai, his emotions will show on his face, and he’s definitely not prepared for that conversation. That seems like it should be the end of it, since they’ve reached the obvious endpoint; uncharacteristically, though, his roommate keeps talking.

“I thought you would ask about the update.”

“Well, yeah. Did it go well?”

“That isn’t what I meant.” Ai swivels in his chair, facing him front-on. “Didn’t you find it strange?”

“Huh?”

“At the film shoot, Nanami said that maybe I wasn’t so different from humans after all. But humans don’t have to take days off to reboot themselves, or to update their software. You must have realised we have nothing in common.”

He thinks carefully about his words before answering, sharply aware of the weight of Ai’s gaze. “I don’t think that’s true. It’s like – it’s like being sick, isn’t it? Humans need time off to fix themselves sometimes, too.”

“But illness isn’t permanent. For instance, when you had a cold last winter, your body’s immune system eventually defeated it. In comparison, my updates aren’t like that at all. I’ll have to deal with them for as long as I operate.”

“Not all illnesses can be cured,” Syo says, mouth suddenly dry. “Some are… some are chronic. That’s just how you are.”

He gets a noncommittal noise in response, and it makes his stomach twist. Is this it? When it comes down to it, when Ai is seeking reassurance in his own obstinate way, is this really the best he can do?

No. He may not know how Ai will respond if he pushes the issue, but at this point, he can’t accept letting it slide either. He takes an unsteady breath, and then launches into the meat of it.

“Look, I’ll put it like this. It doesn’t matter if you’re a human or a robot. You’re my roommate, and my mentor, and… and you’re my friend. I want to be able to help you – no, not just that. I want to get through to you!”

Ai looks at him for a long, long time, and the silence crashes down all at once. He’s always difficult to read, but his eyes seem more inscrutable than usual, somehow. Syo ducks his head to hide the heat creeping into his face.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. That it’d make me happy if you took me seriously, I guess. I don’t know how you see me, but I don’t just want to be someone you’re meant to be training. I want to do more for you, but I don’t understand how, and you never tell me what you need.”

“What I need…?” He seems to mull it over, eyebrows furrowing slightly. “Well, I didn’t need you to look after me while I updated. I told you from the start it was a standard, low-risk procedure.”

“Oh.”

“But, since you did anyway: thank you.”

Syo grins, hugely and wholeheartedly. “You’re welcome.”

It’s progress, of a sort, and it buoys him through the rest of the day. Through solo and group rehearsals, through lunch with the rest of Starish, through the comments about how he seems to be in an unusually good mood. And when he meets with Nanami to run his lyrics past her, and she looks at him strangely and says _Syo, is this… is this a love song?_ – well, maybe it’s the prelude to one.


End file.
